My Writing and the Indie Scene (such as it is)

This post got me thinking about a lot of things, mostly writing related.

Of course, I've been thinking about my writing, which, BTW, now includes another WIP, a paranormal suspense, that's actually based on a short story I tried to submit mucho years ago.  It was rejected by a few different ezines and print zines, and I let it slip by the wayside.

I think I know why: it wasn't good enough.  I thought it was.  After all, I'd just sold my First. Ever. Short. to an ezine...after only submitting it to three places.  Yeah, I was high on myself, and was brought waaay down to Earth after those rejections.

So I moved on to novels.

Novel In Progress Number 1

This is one I originally started years ago.  It had a time travel element to it (a woman going back in time to 1942 to see her birth mother, also, a Roman deity :-)), but I started reading articles about different things I needed to do (or so I thought) or have in the story, so I chucked in just about anything I could think of.

What a bloated mess.

Well, I resurrected that this past year, completely reworking it, thanks to a writing instructor whose only question was how timely and up to date the time travel element was in fantasy books.  My reading time is small at the moment, but I've been a voracious reader in the past, and I know I'll get back to that way at some point...so my look at recent fantasy books made me conclude to drop that altogether.

Remember that for the next section of this post.

I think it's progressing very well, with a few bumps, but I'll deal with that AFTER I've finished the first draft.

I haven't done any writing in that in about a week or so, because of that short story I mentioned earlier.

Novel In Progress Number 2

Which takes me to my second novel.  I originally thought it would be a novella, which Wikipedia says has between 17,500 and 40,000 words.  Now I'm not so sure.  It might get to novel length (over 40,000 words) because I've been working like a nut case to get it done.

Words so far this week: 2,500.  Don't know what chapter I'm up to, as I haven't figured that out as yet.  But the words are flowing, which is more important.

As I said above, it's a paranormal suspense, like this one, and this one.  All right, not exactly, lol.  The paranormal elements are there, including the protagonist, who has powers to undo dark auras, which can induce people to kill; some romance, with a hunky guy who has a leg prosthesis (the romantic element is NOT of the Happily Every After (HEA) variety; and a creepy guy who's the landlord of the building the hunky guy lives in.  Oh, he's got a grisly, um, habit, that was suggested to me by a Beatles tune (I won't say which one).  Not that this particular Beatles tune has anything grisly in the lyrics; it's one of their most wistful almost melancholy tunes, I think.

The New Indie Scene

With lots of sales of The Kindle ebook reader last Christmas, tons of people started to download ebooks from Amazon.  And figure in Barnes and Noble's Nook.  And smartphones.

You get the idea.

Amanda Hocking is the current darling of the self pubbing scene, having sold a boatload of ebooks.  Her key was to upload a slew of books in the same series (YA paranormal, I believe), and enough people decided to give it a whirl that she was number one on Amazon's Kindle bestselling ebooks list for weeks.

Now you're wondering...where is this leading to?  (If you've already figured it out, skip this sentence. ;-))

I'm not getting any younger, and my health has come into question a lot lately - I'm not ready to kick the bucket yet, and intend to be around for a looong time - so I'm considering other ideas.  Nothing is set in granite at this point, but I like to explore everything that's available.  And ebooks - Kindle, Nook, whatever - are a big thing at the moment.

I'll just continue to gather facts and opinions before doing anything.  Part of that fact finding mission was accomplished over the weekend: I bought two Kindle-formatted ebooks off of Smashwords.  Why there and not Amazon?  Because Amazon doesn't use PayPal and Smashwords does.

I downloaded To Kill a Warlock, by H. P. Mallory (great cover, BTW) and Loose Ends, by Terri Reid.  The first is an urban fantasy (which I thought I didn't care for), while the second is a paranormal mystery.  Both women decided now was the time to get their stories out there, instead of going through the query agent/submit to publisher grind.  I admire them both for deciding to go this route, because it's not an easy thing, ESPECIALLY if you've heard for quite a while that getting an agent is not only a pain in the ass but they can do some horrid things to your royalty statements (I'll probably do a post on that sometime).  Submitting directly to publishers ain't easy, either; most have eliminated their slush piles (with the agents now in charge of that).

I haven't gotten through either book as yet, but when I do, I'll do reviews.

In the meantime, you simply have to see this fun cover of Ms. Mallory's (which she did herself!):